Best Practices for building Insurance Websites - Part 4

Step 4 – Define “Measures of Success” against each Goal

Most often we get caught up in defining objectives, strategies and tactics but forget to identify metrics that will provide an indication of what is or isn’t working. Analytics is one of the most critical components of any web projects. Implementing an analytic tool is simple and some are even available for free.

This becomes nearly impossible as your website grows to a point that it receives more than a thousand visitors daily—no one has the time to keep up with the constant inflow of new traffic. One of the main reasons to add the Analytics Tool is to track trends. You’ll want to know, in a snapshot view, the results of different “campaigns”, posts and social bookmarking/networking stumbles etc. Without these trends, you cannot grow your site, neither do you know if you are pleasing your visitors (resulting in a general increase in traffic) or targeting the right keywords.

Although you generally form your visitor base with the content you write, implementing a statistics program on your site will benefit you by allowing you to more accurately target a market, whether in a specific country, age group, or lifestyle (earnings, home value, etc.). Out of all factors, this may be the biggest reason to ensure tracking of your website.

by Subir Singh (subir.singh@edynamic.net)

Best Practices for building Insurance Websites - Part 3

Step 3 – Define Strategies that will lead to achieving these Goal

1. Enable Customer Education & Research
2. Simplify product offerings
3. Ensure the website is a source of Information & Knowledge for Prospects, Customers, Agents, Employees, Media personnel, etc.
4. Connect the offline branding & promotion activities with the online channel
5. Provide visitors on the website with adequate tools that enable then to conduct research
6. Provide customers with self servicing capabilities
7. Encourage Lead Generation

by Subir Singh (subir.singh@edynamic.net)

Best Practices for building Insurance Websites - Part 2

Step 2 – Understand your Target Audience

Before you get down to defining strategies that can enable your goals you need to understand your Target Audiences and their needs

1) Prospects – Looking to buy Insurance can be categorized as follows:

• Those who know exactly what they are looking for. They understand their need and know the product they are looking for.
  
• Those who have a specific need and want to identify products that fit their needs. E.g someone who needs to buy a Child Insurance Plan that would provide them a sum of money for their child’s graduate education.
  
• Those who know they need insurance but are not familiar with the various categories of insurance (Child, Health, Pension, Growth, etc.)

2) Customers – These are existing customers who can be categorized as follows:

• Those looking for specific information to do with their existing relationship
• Those looking at using the web as a channel to pay renewals
• Those looking for additional products. They could then fall into any one of the categories mentioned in 1 above

3) Agents – Existing & Prospective Agents

• Existing Agents
• Self Servicing Requirement – Looking for specific information for themselves – product related, access to the Agent Portal, etc.
• Client Servicing Requirement – looking for product related information, NAVs, etc.
• Prospective Agents – Looking at a Career with the Insurance company – this could be an agent with a competitor and wants to switch someone completely new to Insurance and is looking to make a career in the Insurance Industry

Based on the objectives, the needs of the target audience need to be prioritized and the website structure laid out accordingly.

by Subir Singh (subir.singh@edynamic.net)

Best Practices for building Insurance Websites - Part 1

As the Insurance Industry becomes more competitive and product offerings more complex there is a growing need for customers to do more research before they decide on what product they need to buy.

While Customers today are willing to buy certain categories of Insurance online such as Travel or Automotive insurance the Internet is yet primarily a channel for Research. However, researching on the Web often doesn’t translate into a policy application through any channel. Low conversion rates are the result of a complex product and a low-commitment research channel.

Life insurance as an example won’t see the same online sales success that auto insurers will enjoy. However the web can prove a useful channel to promote the prospect to the next level and lead to applications through other channels.

In a survey done in the US by Forrester Research in 2007 it was seen that of the 3 million Americans who have researched life insurance during the past year, more than one in three used the Internet to do so, making it the second most popular research channel after researching in person.

Insurance companies need to clearly identify & understand the objectives and purpose their websites serve.Assuming that the website can become a huge Point of Sale is not only a false expectation but it can also ignore the need for providing information that will enable prospects to conduct research and maybe even fill out an enquiry form

So the question really is – What should Insurance Websites focus on that would make them “successful”? “Successful”being the loaded and operative word here! So let’s start

Step 1: Identify the Goals for the website

Step 2: Understand your Target Audience

Step 3: Identify Strategies that will lead to achieving these Goals

Step 4: Define “Measures of Success” against each Goal


Let’s start with Step 1– Identifying the Goals for the website

For most insurance companies the goals could be summed up into the following

1. Customer Acquisition - Both lead generation and sales in some cases

2. Customer Retention – Servicing existing customers

3. Agent Recruitment – The agent network is the primary sales channel and hence there is strong focus on this area

4. Employee Acquisition – the website could be a large source of resumes

5. Brand Promotion – last but not least this is every Marketers objective. To not only promote the brand online but also create recall and align with offline promotion activities


Along with defining your goals it is also critical to prioritize them. This is very useful when it comes to allocating real estate and defining content focus on the website

Stay Tuned for – Step 2 – Understand your Target Audience

by Subir Singh (subir.singh@edynamic.net)